Jake Cole

The documentary often struggles to extract deeper thoughts from its subject about her wild career as a pioneering rock feminist.

Despite its energetic, intricately climax, Railroad Tigers is at its most entertaining when merely observing Chan’s smaller movements.

Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.

In flinching at the end, The Running Man ultimately becomes akin to the very thing it criticizes: a hollow, mollifying image of empowerment that distracts from the logical conclusions of its nihilistic premise.

The film falls back on a reductive rumination on the balance between maternal obligation and career aspiration.

In a time when awareness and acknowledgement of racial bias and extrajudicial measures by law enforcement in America is at its most widespread, such scenes feel condescendingly pitched to an unconverted audience of the imagination.

The film may involve the instant movement among unfathomable distances and the shattered limits of space and time, but it’s only Storm Reid's character who feels multidimensional.

Too much is at stake throughout, leading to formulaic plot filler and exposition that snuff out the spark of the early scenes.

At once bloated and rushed, Eternals suffers from frequent lurches in tempo that dispel its occasional moments of tranquil thoughtfulness.

Deadpool 2 muddies the distinction between parodying comic-book-movie conventions and perfunctorily adhering to them.

Like all Aaron Sorkin-penned characters, this film’s version of Lucille Ball is a mouthpiece for his brand of smarmy, know-it-all sarcasm.

The film is initially distinguished by its poetic understatement, only for it to eventually succumb to staleness.

By the time the demands of big-budget spectacle take over in the final act, a film that initially stands out from the pack in imagining a different perspective of the world ends up looking all too disappointingly like everything else in the current mega-budget cinema landscape.

There’s no attempt to hide that the film is pure fan service, a greatest-hits mashup of Spider-Man’s cinematic legacy.

The Kitchen’s inability to criticize its characters without falling back on mild endorsement for their warped empowerment cheapens the film’s moments of reflection, turning them into perfunctory scenes of mild protest.

Fly Me to the Moon’s sudden shift toward the weighty throws off the pace of what had been a formulaic but charming rom-com, as the heavy-handed look at both Cole’s and Kelly’s past demons fails to mesh cohesively with the antic silliness that preceded it.

In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.

After its bracing opening, the film begins to indulge the worst impulses of well-meaning liberal cinema.

The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.

The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.

Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.

It careens from carnage to group therapy so wildly that the action never gets to build and the conversations just repeat themselves.

The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.

Jonah Hill constantly falls back on providing vague justification for his characters' behaviors, along with spoonfuls of sentiment to let the more dour moments go down easier.

For a story that seeks to champion the unpredictability and finite quality of life, Ares ultimately feels trapped by the inertia of working within the parameters set by its no less flimsy predecessors.

Terminator Genisys feels like being trapped in a conversation with a child breathlessly recounting the highlights of the preceding movies.

Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.

The film's action sequences are a jumble of movement and cuts that have no discernible relation to the actual motion of the characters.

In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.

Portraying Tubman above all else as a vessel for a higher power ironically only makes her appear less tangible.

One of the more admirable traits of the original Bourne trilogy is how little pleasure it takes in its violence, but Jason Bourne revels in its vicious action sequences.

There's a blank space at the core of Molly's Game that the protagonist cannot fill, unable as she is to represent anything beyond her esoteric narrative of unorthodox self-actualization.

The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.

On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.

As a suspense film, it’s so sluggishly structured that it borders on the avant-garde.

Even the depiction of how both men waver during the Wimbledon final — of Borg losing his cool while McEnroe avoids succumbing to petulance — fails to tie into the larger portrait of their rivalry.

As ever, Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists' wistfulness with grotesquerie.

It reduces the domestication of wolves to a series of simplistic interactions that don’t exactly convey the difficulties of a wild animal overcoming millennia of instinct.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

Peterloo so simply recounts the details of its subject matter that its culminating horror unsettlingly feels like little more than a cathartic inevitability.

When the film's tone slides so firmly back into the murk, it's hard not to see DC's notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.

The tediously forestalled twists suck away time from what should be the film's focus—its action—and leaves only two scenes worthy of celebration.

Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.

Don’t Worry Darling has the swing-for-the-fences ambition that should have at least made it a noble and compelling folly, but its repetitiveness frustratingly undercuts its grandiosity.

The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.

Fahrenheit 11/9 represents a sincerely bold attempt to capture the overwhelming civic decay that led to our current political crisis, but Michel Moore’s circus-showman duplicity is as crass and abhorrently self-promoting as that of Donald Trump.

One may wish that the entire film had restaged the entirely of Tchaikovsky's ballet rather than reimagine it as an ultimately lifeless epic fantasy.

The film is an all-too-fitting whimper of a conclusion to a franchise that never remotely fulfilled its potential.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.

Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.

In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.

The film should have been a cautionary tale, but in Peter Berg's hands, it's a hollow account of the resilience of the human spirit.

The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.

This is a left-footed and clumsily insistent work, exposing the worst aspects inherent to the Dardennes' style.

By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.

The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.

The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.

There's nothing at the center of Live by Night, no foundation of drama to ground the convoluted mash-up of so many genre tropes.

The film proves again that the modern-day veneration of Jane Austen as the patron saint of the rom-com is also an act of simplification.

Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.

The film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.

The film fails to use its millennial characters to investigate contemporary attitudes about the possibility of world annihilation.

Motherless Brooklyn feels altogether too tidy, a film that revives many of the touchstones of noir, but never that throbbing unease that courses through the classics of the genre.

The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.

The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film.

The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret

The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.

This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.

The overriding despair of Winter's War's imagery calls into question who, exactly, the film is for.

Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.

The only thing that offsets the film's self-negating revisionism are the scenes involving Gillian Anderson vicereine.

The hollow grandeur of the film's action only gives the proceedings a glib undertone that also undermines the rare occasions of earnestness that the heroes exhibit toward fallen comrades.

Ewan McGregor’s inert adaption smooths out the Philip Roth novel's eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.